I’m almost immediately a lot more comfortable here than Mastodon. I’ve been on Mastodon pretty much since Elon’s takeover of Twitter started to materialize, but I rarely interact there. I don’t like to microblog, and I’m not particularly interested in reading them, although I’ve had some good conversations there around hashtags rather than people, but the issue is that hashtags aren’t universal, so the content you get following one depends greatly on your home instance.

Lemmy is exactly how I used Reddit. Join a community, find interesting posts, reply to interesting comments. The UI is obviously a little rougher and I guess the biggest thing missing is a global search to find communities. Many of the communities I’ve subscribed to are pretty low-volume at this point, and I’m just waiting to see if they take off or I find one that suits me better.

I believe in the long run there will be a focus on development for better, customizable, algorithmic discoverability, because as much as the Silicon Valleys algorithms are harmful, there are still benefits to them. For example I had to mute some interesting accounts, because their posting frequency floods my timeline. Hopefully it won’t be necessary in the future.